A Brief Experience With Ninja Gaiden 3’s New Ryu Hayabusa

While Ryu Hayabusa may be a ninja, he isn’t exactly known for stealth or subtlety. He’s more likely to kill groups of enemies with exploding shuriken or giant spike-tipped staffs than sneak up on anyone. That’s why I was so surprised when I picked up the controller for an in-progress Ninja Gaiden 3 demo, and the first thing I was tasked with was sneaking up on a rooftop-mounted soldier with a rocket launcher.

When I got close enough (slowly walking up to my foe as to not make noise), I was prompted to press triangle. Ryu ran his sword through the enemy from behind, tearing his sword through his enemy’s side before finishing him with a slash to the neck.

I jumped down from the rooftop but the streets below were filled with smoke. I couldn’t see where to go, so I just started running forward, drawing gunfire from an unseen opponent. After taking a couple hits, I followed the bullets to their origin and slashed the shooter to ribbons. Despite killing the immediate threat, I was still lost. I stood still for a moment to recharge some of Ryu’s lost health, and a prompt came up telling me that I could use R1 to sense a path through the smoke. Naturally, after being pointed in the right direction, I ran that way as fast as I could…

Only to be greeted some more bullets.

After exterminating the soldier that shot at me, I once again tried to sense my path through the myopia, this time making sure to slowly proceed as to not draw attention to myself. I crept up on an unaware soldier, killing him before he knew I was there.

After finally escaping the smoke (killing a few soldiers in the process), Ryu came upon an eight-legged robot. While Ryu was warned over the radio that the machine was too powerful for him to fight, the boss was easily damaged by attacking the ends of its legs. To win the fight, I needed to keep moving. Ryu’s former frontward roll (performed by blocking and moving the left analog stick forward) has been replaced by a functionally identical slide.

I rolled and slid all over the place dodging machine-gun fire and explosives. When I damaged each leg enough, a button prompt came up, allowing Ryu to stick his blade into the leg and tear through it by mashing square. After taking out all of the legs, I was prompted once again to mash square, this time to jump atop the machine and carve through it. As Ryu hopped away and the machine exploded, the demo came to an end.

Ninja Gaiden 3 will be released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii U in 2012.

From the description, it seems that what used to be good turned out to be better. Will be good to have a bit more of stealth options to change the pace a bit. I’m looking foward to this game.

malek86

I’m still not very convinced by the QTEs, I’m hoping they won’t be too prominent. And what about regenerating health? Do you get to regenerate all your health, or only part of it? And do you need to be completely in the clear of danger, or can you regenerate as long as you’re out of fire’s way?

“Ryu’s former frontward roll (performed by blocking and moving the left analog stick forward) has been replaced by a functionally identical slide.”

It was like that in NG2 too. Don’t remember about NGB though.

I should really try and put up a NG2 review on Bounce. Well, maybe tomorrow.

Well, if you’ve watched interviews or whatnot, the QTE’s are just tutorial prompts. They’ll be gone completely.

If this automatically heals completely, they wouldn’t use a falcon.

Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden: Sigma had rolling for a dodge, which isn’t as good as NG2’s dodge imo.

mikanko

The problem with the QTE’s isn’t the button prompts themselves, but how the game slows down and zooms in and you’re expected to press the correct of two buttons to finish the enemy off. It goes contrary to the previous games designs which were far more unrelenting.

It also appeared that anyone playing the game in footage were pretty bad at playing the game though, never blocking, not utilizing Ryu’s movement properly etc. So it’s really hard to gauge how slow the game is to its predecessors when it never seemed people playing the game knew what they were doing <.<;

QTEs = lazy game developers. Also lack of gibs and flying limbs is disappointing.

Aara_Malik_Davoodi

the QTE icons will disappear after the tutorial, and the finisher button
will be integrated with a combo sequence and will change according to
the move set you chose. And if you look at other games with QTEs, like God of War 3, and call them lazy, you should get your eyes checked.